Forget About Email Attachment Tracking. Here’s What To Do Instead.

We’ve been there. You send a case study to a lead. After a few minutes, you see that she’s opened it, and she even downloaded the email attachment.

But…that’s it? Is that everything you need to know about your lead? Does email attachment tracking helps you understand your lead and learn how they interact with the content I share?

How email attachment tracking works

Email attachment tracking tools have become very popular among sales teams. And for a good reasons!

Vendors offering email attachment tracking create specialized links to your material that route your leads first through the vendor’s servers and then to your actual content. So they can notify you when your lead open the email and download attachments among other things.

You might be thinking, that sounds amazing. Hmm…yes! But unfortunately email tracking and email attachment often doesn’t work. Here’s why:

#1 – Enterprise Firewalls and Security Services

Now that you know how email attachment tracking actually works, you will get a huge problem if you are dealing with companies that have firewalls or email security in place. The security software flags those redirected attachments as phishing attempts and your leads won’t be able to see the attachments. And you will need to explain this embarrassing situation to your potential client.

#2 – Forwarded emails won’t work

Not every lead is a decision-maker. So your lead will forward your content to his/her boss for internal evaluation.

If this your situation, the email attachment tracking tool won’t work for you. Majority of email attachment tracking doesn’t account for forwarded messages. Your dashboard won’t notify you, and it will look as if the attachment was never opened.

#3 – Email attachments are the devil

Messages with attachments are annoying and most recipients won’t trust them. Email attachments are the hallmark of many phishing scams and often end up in the junk folder automatically.

#4 – There’s no insights on what actually interests leads

Even if you know that your lead downloaded your attachment…what does that really tell you?

Biggest problem of all is that email attachment tracking provides you with zero insights into whether or not your lead was actually interested in what you sent.

If email attachment tracking doesn’t work, what’s the alternative? We have a better and simple way to know whether your leads are actually interested in your content:

Track their engagement instead of track email attachments!

To get your prospects all the way through to the funnel, you need to go beyond opens, clicks and downloads. You need to understand them, and know exactly how engaged they are in the sales process.

By tracking engagement you will know exactly what interests your leads, right in the moment they show interest. So you can close deals faster.

Know what your prospects are actually interested in

All this metrics and information will help you put objections into context, anticipate possible questions, know which information is more relevant to them and know exactly when and how to follow-up those prospects. Knowing when to reach out is just as important as knowing what to say.

And you don’t need another content management platform. You can use your dropbox documents directly. You can continue using your current workflow, but being way more efficient!